We are excited to announce the general availability of the Sipwise C5CE and C5PRO mr10.3.1 release.

What is the Sipwise C5 platform?

Sipwise C5 PRO Architecture Overview

The Sipwise C5 platform is a highly versatile open source based VoIP soft-switch for ISPs and ITSPs to serve large numbers of SIP subscribers. It leverages existing building blocks like Kamailio, Sems and Asterisk to create a feature-rich and high-performance system by glueing them together in a best-practice approach and implementing missing pieces on top of it. Sipwise engineers have been working with Asterisk and Kamailio (and its predecessors SER and OpenSER) since 2004, and have roles on the management board of Kamailio and are contributing to these projects both in terms of patches and also financially by sponsoring development tasks. The Sipwise C5 platform is available as a Community Edition (CE), which is fully free and open source, and as a commercial PRO appliance shipped turn-key in a high availability setup. The Sipwise C5 provides secure and feature-rich voice and video communication to end customers (voice, video, instant messaging, presence, buddy lists, file transfer, screen sharing, remote desktop control) and connect them to other SIP-, Mobile- or traditional PSTN-networks. It can therefore act as open Skype replacement system, traditional PSTN replacement, Over-The-Top (OTT) platform and also as a Session Border Controller in front of existing VoIP services in order to enable signaling encryption, IPv6 support, fraud- and Denial-of-Service prevention. Another use-case is to act as a Class4 SIP concentrator to bundle multiple SIP peerings for other VoIP services.

What’s new in mr10.3.1?

The most important changes for mr10.3 compared to mr10.2 are:

  • Codecs filtering preferences extended to peers. [TT#157352]

  • New mode “forward” for location mappings added: it allows to create an additional branch to a peer when a local subscriber is called. [TT#109104]

  • Statistics: Add new panels showing average MOS values and average call duration. [TT#156052]

  • [PRO/Carrier] B2B: New sems.conf parameter introduced ‘send_491_on_pending_session_leg’, which defines whether we send 491 upon receiving re-INVITE in one leg, meanwhile in an opposite leg there is still a pending transaction. [TT#155800]

  • RTP/RTCP: ‘NAT and Media Flow Control’ → ‘ipv46_for_rtpproxy = auto’ domain/subscriber preference is now fully supported and can be used by IPv6 based subscribers. [TT#151404]

  • RTP/RTCP: The handling of local media ports has been improved to allow unused ports to be released early. This is applicable to branched calls which result in separate media ports being opened for each branch. Previously all media ports would be released only at the final teardown of the call. With the improved handling unused ports stemming from closed branches can be closed while the call is still ongoing, allowing these ports to be used for other calls. [TT#156900]

  • RTP/RTCP: Call legs which have been determined to support RTCP multiplexing or are known to have mandatory support for RTCP multiplexing (e.g. WebRTC) no longer allocate a local RTCP port. These call legs are now also able to use odd-numbered RTP media ports, making it possible to support up to twice the number of such calls. [TT#156900]

  • Sound sets: A directory used to store an audio cache (for the sound sets) is now changed from the ‘/var/cache/’ to the ‘/ngcp-data/cache/’. [TT#151402]

  • [PRO/Carrier] ngcpcfg-api: the service is no longer enabled by default. [TT#113051]

  • [PRO/Carrier] ngcpcfg-api: the password that used to be set in /usr/share/ngcpcfg-api/config.yml gets no longer used. [TT#113051]

See the list of all changes in PDF Changelog_mr10.3.1

What is mr10.3.1?

The build mr10.3.1 is the first build for release mr10.3, mr10.3.1 provides new features and bugfixes.

Is mr10.3 LTS (long time supported) release?

No. See the release calendar on https://www.sipwise.com/releases/.

How do I test-drive the new version?

As usual, we’re providing a VMWare Image, a Virtualbox Image and a Vagrant Box for quick evaluation testing. For those of you using Amazon Cloud we provide the EC2 AMIs in the following regions:

  • AMI ID for region ap-northeast-1: ami-095d5b147eeb76123

  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-1: ami-0c31b0605ecc5eacd

  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-2: ami-0ff6a02bd43571350

  • AMI ID for region eu-central-1: ami-00cda0665a2f0c392

  • AMI ID for region eu-west-1: ami-0f62247dbcdd5e357

  • AMI ID for region sa-east-1: ami-0c649e37ac4d87365

  • AMI ID for region us-east-1: ami-041cd18e9f25fd84d

  • AMI ID for region us-west-1: ami-0b735f2972bd6c7d8

  • AMI ID for region us-west-2: ami-0a5c26610484e85eb

Check the relevant section in the Sipwise C5 CE Handbook for detailed instructions.

How do I install the new version or upgrade from an older one?

For new users, please follow the Installation Instructions in the Handbook to set up the Sipwise C5 CE mr10.3.1 from scratch. For the users of the previous version of Sipwise C5 CE, please follow the upgrade procedure outlined in the Handbook. If you have customized your configurations using customtt.tt2 files, you must migrate your changes to the new configuration files after the upgrade, otherwise, all your calls will most certainly fail. Hint: modern patchtt.tt2 framework can help you here in the future.

How can I contribute to the project?

Sipwise is publishing software components at github.com/sipwise. Please check it regularly for new projects to appear there, and feel free to fork them and send us pull requests. For development related questions, please subscribe to our Dev Mailing-List.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our PRO/Carrier customers and the Sipwise C5 CE community for their feedback,bug reports and feature suggestions to make this release happen. We hope you enjoy using our software and keep your input coming. A big thank you also to all the developers of Kamailio, Sems and Prosody, who make it possible for us to provide an innovative and future-proof SIP/XMPP engine as the core of our platform! And last but not least a HUGE thank you to the Sipwise development team, who worked insanely hard to create this release. You are awesome!